Liam Barr

You could name three things holding you back.
No thinking required.
They're always ready.

The years you spent doing something else first.
The people who started earlier.
The questions nobody was around to answer.

Now look at the work you'd keep.
You figure things out alone because no one was there to ask.
You see what's missing because you came in late.

None of that came from an easy run.

It came from those three.

You named three things holding you back.
That's what makes the work yours.

There's a rule you never agreed to but follow anyway.
That enjoying where you are counts as agreeing to stay.

So you hold the good parts at arm's length.
You keep your enthusiasm quiet in case someone reads it as proof you've stopped wanting more.

Nobody is watching that closely.
Nobody is reading your good mood as a signature.

You can want out of a place and still like the light in it.

Both can be true at once.
You added the rule that says otherwise.

You can enjoy it here and still go.
Liking where you are is just refusing to throw the time away.

Someone decides early what you're worth and then stops looking.

You feel that as rejection, so you set about correcting it. More effort. Better evidence. The version of you that shows up when someone actually wants it there.
None of it was ever going to arrive.

They weren't weighing you up. They were walking past.

What they walked past was the work you'd have done for them and the years of it they could have had.
They spent that on nothing and they'll never learn the price.

You can't argue it into them either, because value doesn't transfer through explanation.
It transfers when someone chooses to look.

So they left settled.
You're still holding a receipt for a sale that never happened.

Put it down.
It's the one part of this you're still in charge of.